Microsoft's note-taking application OneNote has long been the company's attempt to build a "killer app" for the tablet PC. Over the years, OneNote has acquired a small but devoted fanbase of users who adore its rich multimedia scrapbooking and stylus/pen integration. Yet somehow, OneNote never won mainstream appeal.

The application is arguably Microsoft's only extant one that is truly built for touch, but it's built for the "old" approach to touch: stylus input. With Windows 8, Microsoft has at long last acknowledged that successful touch interfaces need to be finger-based, instead of pen-based. The company seems to now recognize that the constraints of finger-based input require a new approach to designing user interfaces.

In response, Microsoft has made not one, but two new versions of OneNote. There's a regular desktop application that's a derivative of the current OneNote 2010 product and will run on both Windows 7 and Windows 8. There's also going to be a new, Metro-style OneNote application built for finger friendliness.

OneNote is one of only two applications in the Office 2013 suite getting this treatment (the other is the Lync client); all the other Office 2013 applications are straightforward desktop apps. We've had a chance to use the desktop application for a few days, and we'll look at the Metro-style application once it becomes available.

Of all the applications in Office 2013, the desktop OneNote has probably seen the fewest changes. It has, of course, been updated to use the new visual style. There has also been a slight reorganization of the layout: different notebooks are now listed in a drop-down list at the top of the screen rather than in a sidebar.

OneNote has been at the vanguard of Microsoft's cloud integration. It supports syncing of OneNote notebooks through SkyDrive and SharePoint, as well as concurrent editing. Microsoft even has clients for numerous mobile platforms, including Windows Phone, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Microsoft says that OneNote 2013's syncing is faster; the extent to which this is true is hard to ascertain.

This syncing and cross-device support has been enhanced with Resume Reading. OneNote saves a bookmark of your current location within the notebook, so you can pick up exactly where you left off when you switch devices.

OneNote supports embedding of various resources, including pictures, sound recordings, and video. Microsoft has now added support for embedding Excel and Visio resources, which appear as live-updated previews within the notebook.

Related to the ability to embed Excel documents, OneNote tables can now be converted into embedded Excel spreadsheets, giving access to Excel's richer visualization and processing capabilities.

That's about the full extent of what's new in OneNote 2013 on the desktop. The Metro-style application will be more exotic, including a new kind of radial menu designed for touch input. The desktop app, however, is the most minor of evolutions. OneNote 2013 will continue to be an application for the devotees, without mainstream appeal.